Then old Quinn got after him—wild-eyed, tangle-haired old Quinn, the gunner, who was half cracked on religion. He prayed and blubbered beside the wretched boy, overwhelming him with red-hot appeals and perfervid oratory. Billy became an instant convert, and got to love old Quinn as a dog his master. There was no more card-playing in Billy’s cell, no more rum or tobacco; even checkers fell under the iron ban of old Quinn, to whom every enjoyment was hateful. Billy learned hymns instead, and would beguile the weary sentry on the watch with his tuneful rendering of “Go Bury thy Sorrow,” or “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” He was possessed, too, of a Bible that Quinn gave him, from which the old gunner would read, in his strident, overbearing voice, the sweet gospel of charity and good will. But if old Quinn accomplished much, he ran, as they all ran at last, into that stone wall of words which Billy raised against the world. Contrition for the murder which had doomed him to die was what Billy would not show or profess in any way to feel. Rant though old Quinn might, and beseech on bended knees, with his eyes burning and his great frame shaking with agitation, he could extort from his convert no other answer than the one which all knew so well. Billy’s eyes would snap and his mouth harden.
“White fellow no good; I kill him.”
As the days passed, and the ship made her way from bay to bay, from island to island, in the course of her policing cruise among those lawless whites and more than savage blacks, the captain grew desperate with the problem of Billy. They all said that Casement looked ten years older, and that something would soon happen to the “old man” if Billy did not soon skip out; and the “old man” showed all the desire in the world to bring about so desirable a consummation. Billy was accorded every liberty; his chains had long been things of the past, and no sentinel now guarded him in his cell or watched him periodically in his sleep. Billy was free to go where he would; and it was the fervent hope of all that he would lose no time in making his way ashore. But though Casement stopped at half a hundred villages, and laid the ship as close ashore as he dared risk her, still, for the life of him, Billy would not budge. Then they thought him afraid of sharks, which are plentiful in those seas, and kept the dinghy at the gangway, in defiance of every regulation, in the hope that the prisoner would deign to use it. But Billy showed no more desire to quit the ship than Casement himself, or old Quinn. He did the honours of the man-of-war to visiting chiefs, and seemed to be proud of his assured position on board. Go ashore? Escape? Not for worlds!
Then the captain determined upon new measures. He passed a hint to Facey, and Facey passed it to the mess, and the mess to the blue-jackets, that they were making things too comfortable for their prisoner. For a while Billy’s easy life came to an abrupt conclusion. His best friends began to kick and cuff him without mercy. He was rope’s-ended by the bo’sun’s mate, and the cook threw boiling water over his naked skin. The boy’s heart almost broke at this, and he went about dejected and unhappy for the first time since he had come aboard. But no harsh usage, no foul words, could drive him to desert the ship. He stuck to it like a barnacle, for all the captain spun out the cruise to an unconscionable length and stopped at all sorts of places that offered a favorable landing for the prisoner. But if Billy grew sad and moody under the stress of whippings and bad words, it was as nothing to the change in Casement himself, who turned daily greyer and more haggard as he pricked a course back to Sunflower Bay. Of course, he maintained a decent reserve all along, and betrayed, in words at least, not a sign of his consuming anxiety to rid himself of Billy. But at last even his iron front broke down. It was on the bridge, to Facey, when the ship had just dropped anchor in Port McGuire, not forty miles from Sunflower Bay.
“Mr. Facey,” he said, “send Mr. Burder ashore with an armed party; tell him just to show himself a bit and come off again.”
“I am thinking they might take that fellow Billy to translate for them,” he went on, shamefacedly.
The first lieutenant turned to go.
“Hold on,” said the captain, suddenly lowering his voice and drawing his subordinate close to him. “Just you pass it on to Burder that I wouldn’t skin him alive—you know what I mean—if—well, suppose that black fellow cut his lucky altogether—”
Facey smiled.